'I have just finished Belial! 'he said, with a sigh of satisfaction,
'and am beginning Beelzebub.'

A craze of this kind was naturally followed by a feverish period
of juvenile authorship, when the house was littered over with stanzas
from the opening canto of a great poem on Columbus, or with moral
essays in the manner of Pope, castigating the vices of the time
with an energy which sorely tried the gravity of the mother whenever
she was called upon, as she invariably was, to play audience to the
young poet. At the same time the classics absorbed in reality their
full share of this fast developing power. Virgil and Aeschylus
appealed to the same fibres, the same susceptibilities, as Milton
and Shakspeare, and, the boy's quick imaginative sense appropriated
Greek and Latin life with the same ease which it showed in possessing
itself of that bygone English life whence sprung the 'Canterbury
Tales,' or 'As You Like It.' So that his tutor, who was much
attached to him, and who made it one of his main objects in life
to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical
_minutiae_, began about the time of Sir Mowbray's letter to prophesy
very smooth things indeed to his mother as to his future success
at college, the possibility of his getting the famous St. Anselm's
scholarship, and so on.

Evidently such a youth, was not likely to depend for the attainment
of a foothold in life on a piece of family privileges. The world
was all before him where to choose, Mrs. Elsmere thought proudly
to herself, as her mother's fancy wandered rashly through the coming
years. And for many reasons she secretly allowed herself to hope
that he would find for himself some other post of ministry in a
very various world than the vicarage of Murewell.